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Northwest Passage. He was, in fact, one of the first to urge key members of the Admiralty to launch a renewed search. But the letters he wrote them also contained cautions based on what he had learned from his northern whaling voyages. “I firmly believe,” he wrote, “that if…a passage does exist, it will be found only at intervals of some years.” This was, he said, because conditions in the Arctic were almost never the same in successive years. The same strait, sound, or other waterway that was free of ice one season might well be completely frozen over the next. Because of this, he stated, even if the passage was found, “it might not again be practical in ten or twenty years.” As even today’s mariners have learned, he was absolutely right.
    In his letters suggesting that the time was now propitious to seek the Passage, Scoresby left no doubt that he believed that he was the man to head one of the earliest expeditions. But he was never chosen. One of the reasons was that he and John Barrow never saw eye to eye on many things regarding both the nature of the Arctic and how an Arctic search should be conducted. This was particularly true of Barrow’s belief in the existence of an Open Polar Sea. Scoresby had seen the barriers of ice that lay in the Arctic. How could Barrow believe that to the north, beyond the barriers—where temperatures actually were lower—there could be a warmer, ice-free sea?
    However, the main reason that Scoresby was never chosen to lead a search had nothing to do with his disagreement with Barrow’s theories. It was simply because he was a whaling captain, not a British naval officer. In the class-conscious English naval system, it was proper for experienced whalemen to be employed as “ice masters” upon royal ships, but certainly not as captains of naval vessels.
    Not only was Scoresby not selected, but the advice that he continually offered as others searched the Arctic was also most often disregarded. He was ignored when he said that the polar ice cap drifted, causing continual changes in the flow and location of the ice pack. He was ignored when he suggested that rather than pulling their heavy sledges across the frozen landscape themselves, the explorers should, like the Inuit, use lighter sledges pulled by dogs. And he was ignored when he warned that sledging parties needed to conduct their searches early in the season when the ice cap was still frozen solid and thus relatively flat, rather than later when the ice became so uneven and bumpy that it was it was often almost impossible to traverse. One of the biggest mistakes the Admiralty made was not taking advantage of the participation and advice of William Scoresby.
    BUCHAN AND FRANKLIN SAILED FROM ENGLAND in April 1818. At first, things could not have gone better. Arriving at Spitsbergen’s Magdalena Bay around June 1, they were astounded by what they first encountered—icebergs whose size and shapes were unlike anything they ever could have imagined, a sun that never set. But abruptly it all changed. On June 7, just as they were entering a vast ice field, enormous winds blew in, coating both the
Dorothea
and the
Trent
with tons of ice. The crews of both vessels were forced to hack away at the ice on their bows and ropes in order to keep the ships under control.
    By June 12, they could move no further. “The brig, cutting her way through the light ice, came in violent contact with the [now hardening] pack,” recounted Lieutenant Frederick William Beechey, a geologist aboard the
Trent.
“In an instant, we all lost our footing, the masts bent with the impetus, and the cracking timbers below bespoke [enormous] pressure. The channels by degrees disappeared, and the ice, with its accustomed rapidity, soon became packed, encircled the vessels and pressed so closely upon them that one boundless plain of rugged snow extended in every direction.”
    For more than three